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Positional astronomy
The challenges of measuring everything from a fast-moving, wobbly platform through a haze.
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Solar System data
Handy tables of orbits, mass, rotation periods and tilts for the planets and their moons in the Solar System.
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Telescopes
With a telescope we can see billons of miles and travel effortlessly back billions of years in time
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Getting involved in astronomy
Everything you need to know to start you on the road to becoming an amateur or professional astronomer.
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Becoming Queen Elizabeth I
Various dramatic events led to Elizabeth I taking over the throne from the Catholic Queen Mary I.
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The Solar System through your own telescope
What can you see in the Solar System through binoculars or a small telescope?
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What was the bright object I saw in the sky last night?
Is it a star, is it a planet or is it a plane? A handy guide to identifying that bright object you saw
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Constellations
The 88 constellations act as a handy map of the skies and a seasonal calendar used from ancient times. But what connects the stars in the same constellation?
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Cosmology
What was the Big Bang and what makes us think this is a productive theory of how everything started?
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The Minor Planets or Asteroids
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids litter the solar system - while fragments of them rain down as meteorites - yet the first one was only found in 1801